On Dreyfus and Everyday Intelligibility

Hubert Dreyfus’ influential interpretation of Heidegger’s Being and Time focused heavily on Division I: on our practical involvement in the world, everyday skill, and the shared practices through which the world becomes intelligible. In doing so, however, Dreyfus largely rejected the importance of Division II. He later acknowledged that this had led him to overlook something significant: Heidegger’s claim that the everyday intelligibility described in Division I would itself need to be understood in light of something more primordial.

In What Could Be More Intelligible Than Everyday Intelligibility?, Dreyfus attempts to correct this mistake. Drawing on Aristotle, Kierkegaard and Theodore Kisiel, he argues that Heidegger’s more primordial intelligibility can be understood through a progression beyond everyday skill and mastery toward what he calls the world transformer: someone capable not merely of acting skilfully within existing practices, but of disclosing new possibilities and transforming those practices themselves.

I think this considerably strengthens Dreyfus’ earlier interpretation of Heidegger, but it does not entirely escape it. His account remains heavily oriented toward skill and practical intelligibility, gives Heideggerian authenticity a surprisingly progressive character, and seems to understate the more fundamental role of temporality in Being and Time. The question, then, is not simply whether Dreyfus can extend his account of everyday intelligibility into Division II, but whether the terms of his original interpretation allow him to capture what Heidegger means by the primordial at all.

Dreyfus begins the essay by both restating his original position that the “source of intelligibility of the world” described in Division I ”is our shared, everyday, public practices”, and acknowledging that Heidegger states that any such understanding will be revised in Division II in light of a more “primordial understanding” (Dreyfus 2005, p. 1). To flesh this out, Dreyfus turns to Theodore Kisiel. According to Kisiel, the divisional structure of Being and Time was organised around the Aristotelian concepts of Techne (everyday skill) and Phronesis (practical wisdom) (Dreyfus 2005, pp. 1-2). To demonstrate this, Dreyfus presents a phenomenological analysis of six distinct stages of skill acquisition. The first four stages fall within the category of Techne; the last two signify a transition beyond the everyday rules and norms and into wisdom as Phronimos, through the encountering of ungroundedness:

This transition occurs through the encountering of ungroundedness: that “there is no reason why our way of doing things is right; it is just what we do” (Dreyfus 2005, p. 5). However, Dreyfus disagrees with Kisiel in his understanding Heidegger’s use of the term Kairos – “Kairos is Aristotle’s term for the moment … the Phronimos grasps the whole temporally unfolding concrete Situation” (Dreyfus 2005, p. 5).

Where Kisiel views Kairos as the final moment in Dasein’s skilful understanding of its concrete situation as “resolute Dasein”, Dreyfus sees it as only the first step beyond Techne and into Phronesis general; that a final level skill of skill lays beyond mastery, that of world transformation (Dreyfus 2005, pp. 5-10). For Dreyfus, Phronesis is divided into two sub-categories, differentiated by the Karios and the Kierkegaardian Augenblick - Augenblick meaning radical transformation as derived from the Christian notion of rebirth. Where Kairos is the moment of understanding the world in its ungroundedness, the Augenblick is the moment of understanding one’s self in its ungroundedness. For Dreyfus, though masters “experiences the thrownness of everyday norms” allowing them to see the background practices for what they are, they are still embedded within them. Whereas, through anticipatory resoluteness in the face of one’s death, the world transformer has revealed not just the ungroundedness of everyday norms, but also the ungroundedness of themselves. The Augenblick marks Dasein’s moment of self-ownership and radical rebirth as its own most self in its ungroundedness. In this understanding, “Dasein manifests ‘its authenticity and its totality’” (Dreyfus 2005, p. 8).

Dreyfus contends that this is what Heidegger meant when he refers to a more primordial understanding than everyday intelligibility: “By facing the anxiety of death in anticipatory resoluteness, and so seeing that his identity and that of his culture is ungrounded and could be radically changed, a fully authentic Dasein can disclose an even higher kind of intelligibility … He can take up marginal possibilities in his culture’s past in way [sic] that enables him to change the style of a whole generation and thereby disclose a new world” (Dreyfus 2005, p. 10, emphasis added). To emphasise this shift from master to world transformer, Dreyfus compares Basketball players Larry Bird and Michael Jordan. Larry Bird perfected his understanding of the rules and structures of the game and played masterfully within them; Michael Jordan played beyond them, playing not as a team player, but as an individual, changing the way people thought about the game itself (Dreyfus 2005, p. 4, p. 7).

The first thing that stands out in Dreyfus’ essay is the strength of his phenomenological approach to skill acquisition. He ably elucidates and makes relatable, many nuances between each skill and their alignment with Heidegger’s thinking in Being and Time. Dreyfus skilfully connects Heidegger’s notions of guilt, resoluteness, and repetition to that of the Aristotelean Phronimos and Kairos as an awareness of the limit-situation. Then from Kairos to Kierkegaard’s Augenblick as an account of radical transformations by reciprocal rejoinder via anticipatory resoluteness - which, for Dreyfus, differentiates the everyday intelligibility from the primordial. However, in doing this, he limits the discussion to the domain of Dasein’s practical intelligibility as skill and leans heavily on his interpretation of Heidegger, and that of Kisiel’s. While Dreyfus presents a strong argument, his position is vulnerable to alternative readings of similar or greater strength.

Two weaknesses

1

Heidegger’s own words contradict Dreyfus’ progressive outline of possible modification to the background practices in his description and examples of world transformers.

2

Dreyfus’ commitment to viewing Heidegger through an equipmental lens seems to blind him to the primordial relevance of temporality as Dasein’s horizon for understanding Being.

First weakness — authenticity and progress

Regarding the first weakness, Dreyfus connects the Kierkegaardian term Augenblick with Heidegger’s conception of anticipatory resoluteness and repetition to get to such cases of world transformers through reciprocal rejoinder. In defence of this Dreyfus quotes Heidegger:

“Repetition makes a reciprocal rejoinder to the possibility of existence that has-been-there… But when such a rejoinder is made to this possibility in a resolution, it is made in an Augenblick; and as such it is at the same time a disavowal of that which in the today, is working itself out as the “past.”

(Dreyfus 2005, p. 8, emphasis in original).

However, directly following this, Heidegger states:

“Repetition does not abandon itself to that which is past, nor does it aim at progress. In the moment of vision [Augenblick] authentic existence is indifferent to both these alternatives”

(Heidegger 1962, p. 438).

According to Heidegger, any such authentic transformation via reciprocal rejoinder is blind to what is good or bad, benefit or detriment. This is problematic for Dreyfus as his examples of world transformers all share the characteristic of progress: Jesus, Martin Luther King Jnr, Michael Jordan, each represent a progression forward from an earlier way of doing things. This positive account of authenticity is Dreyfus’ not Heidegger’s: where Dreyfus sees a positive direction, Heidegger sees neutrality. For Heidegger, authenticity is the constitutive account of who we are as Dasein in our being as our own most owned. Heidegger was not outlining a path of values; he was revealing our being as ourselves in relation to Being ontologically; what is before and the basis on which all interpretations of human-being is possible. Thus, Dreyfus seems to hold an idealistic interpretation of such Heideggerian transformations, which does not appear supported by the text.

Second weakness — primordial temporality

Regarding the second weakness, in Being and Time, Heidegger appears to be working towards something much more fundamental than practical wisdom in his pursuit of the primordialism of Dasein. Dreyfus does a fine job explicating the practicality of Dasein’s skill acquisition within the world and how it could lead to changes in the background practices and norms to which they relate. However, he does not appear to capture Heidegger’s primordial intelligibility in doing this. Dasein’s practical comportment is but one part of a much deeper ontological landscape as being-in-the-world. For instance, there is textual evidence connecting temporality with primordial intelligibility. Near the beginning of Being and Time, Heidegger writes:

“time needs to be explicated primordially as the horizon for the understanding of Being, and in terms of temporality as the Being of Dasein, which understands Being”

(Heidegger 1962, p. 39).

Keller (1999) presents a strong argument against Dreyfus that time as the contextualiser of meaning is the primordial intelligibility Heidegger reveals in Division II. According to Keller, time is the “original possibilizer … the source of possibility itself” and thus “temporality becomes the condition under which all the conditions of the possibility of human existence … is possible” (1999, p.182). So even if Dreyfus is right in his description of Dasein’s skill acquisition through Techne and Phronesis, it does not appear to be a full account of Dasein’s primordial intelligibility.

Considering the above, we need to acknowledge that Heidegger’s complex and self-referencing style of prose, along with his original verbiage seems tailor-made for such contradictory interpretations. With this in mind, we should give Dreyfus room for further argumentation on the degree of significance temporality plays within Heidegger’s ontological structure of Dasein’s intelligibility. However, it is hard to blame Heidegger’s writing for Dreyfus’ bias toward a positive account of authenticity, when directly following the quote Dreyfus uses to support it, Heidegger undermines it.

In sum, Dreyfus’ take on Heidegger is interesting: on one level he is very considered and well thought out, but on another, there appears to be something fundamentally lacking in his reading of Heidegger, specifically, Being and Time. In his attempt to correct his mistake, Dreyfus manages to successfully incorporate elements from Kisiel and Kierkegaard, contextualising them within his original reading of Division I. However, in doing so, Dreyfus highlights the weakness of textual interpretation: it is not clear where Heidegger ends, and Dreyfus begins. He weighs his reading heavily on equipmentality and skill as practical wisdom, takes an overly optimistic interpretation of possible Heideggerian transformations, and seems to underestimate the role of temporality in primordial intelligibility. However, we should give Dreyfus a degree of charity in his reading of Heidegger due to its susceptibility to misinterpretation. While, this seems fair of primordial intelligibility, on the biased progressive direction of authenticity and world transformations, not so much. So, while Dreyfus succeeds in extending his earlier work on Heidegger toward correcting his mistake, he does not go far enough and remains open to further criticism.

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